Mary Fallin has never lost an election and is expected to keep that spotless record intact in November when she seeks a second term as governor. To be on the safe side, though, Fallin is putting as much distance as possible between herself and state schools Superintendent Janet Barresi.

Mary Fallin has never lost an election and is expected to keep that spotless record intact in November when she seeks a second term as governor. To be on the safe side, though, Fallin is putting as much distance as possible between herself and state schools Superintendent Janet Barresi.

Barresi and Fallin have backed many of the same education reform ideas since the two won their respective posts in November 2010. Fallin has called repeatedly for ways to improve Oklahoma education. In her State of the State speech in January, she noted the importance of making sure third-graders are ready to move on when the time comes.

"Too often, we set up children for failure by sending them on to higher grades without the reading skills they need," she said. "We’ve changed course — by requiring that third-graders have to read before moving on to the fourth grade. Thank you for doing that."

Those remarks came before the Legislature voted to roll back the state’s third-grade reading law, before Barresi finished third in the three-person Republican primary in June, and before Fallin’s positives started to slide in polling.

A Sooner Poll taken in June put Fallin’s favorability at 52 percent, compared with 71 percent a year earlier. And a Rasmussen poll released last week had Fallin at 45 percent among likely voters and Democratic challenger state Rep. Joe Dorman at 40 percent.

Dorman, naturally, is pointing to those polls to try to bolster his campaign. He’s also made it a point to tie Fallin with Barresi, whose negatives in advance of her primary election were significant and were borne out in the election results.

So perhaps Fallin’s remarks last week at a state PTA convention in Tulsa were to be expected. The governor said that relying on one reading test to determine whether a third-grader is ready to advance to fourth grade isn’t the best approach. The year-end test was a principal part of the Reading Sufficiency Act, although it also provided students other ways to show their reading proficiency.

Fallin vetoed the replacement law, but was quickly overridden by wide margins. In vetoing the bill, Fallin said the new bill would weaken the standards in the original law.

"If we promote a third-grader to the fourth grade because he or she is 10 years old and not because they’re reading-proficient, we’re setting that child up for failure," she said.

She added that the new law would "gut the state’s literacy programs" and said the education system had "failed our children for decades."

Sending students on to fourth grade "without the basic tools they need to succeed is not just unwise; it is immoral," Fallin said then. "We must ensure our children have basic proficiency in reading before the fourth grade."

At the PTA conference, Fallin didn’t say an end-of-year reading test shouldn’t be used as a determining factor. However, "If we can get to a system where we are measuring a student throughout the progress of their education versus one test — one high-stakes test — we are better serving the children," she said.

Fallin also said that testing accommodations should be made for children in special education or English language learners. In rules related to a state law requiring students to pass four of seven tests to graduate from high school, the state Education Department limits what accommodations could be made for special-needs students.

Fallin made it clear that this was Barresi’s doing. "That’s been her position," she said. "Now I’m telling you what my position is as governor. … She has her ideas. I have my ideas."